Lana Del Rey

Earlier this week, in her new Rolling Stone cover story, Madonna said something that resonated with women everywhere: “We live in a world where people like to pit women against each other. And this is why I love the idea of embracing other females who are doing what I’m doing.”

This is especially true if you’re a female performer of a certain status. Even Madonna atoned for her feud with Lady Gaga, telling RS, “The only time I ever criticized Lady Gaga was when I felt like she blatantly ripped off one of my songs [‘Express Yourself’/’Born This Way’]. It’s got nothing to do with ‘she’s taking my crown’ or ‘she’s in some space of mine.’”
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[Note: There are some spoilers below. But also know that Mommy isn’t the kind of movie that can be “spoiled” with plot details.]

Xavier Dolan seems to love maudlin ’90s music; Heartbeats featured Sting’s “Every Breath You Take,” Laurence Anyways included Celine Dion’s “Pour que tu m’aimes encore” and Craig Armstrong’s “Let’s Go Out Tonight.” But the filmmaker, in interviews, has revealed himself to be entirely self-aware of his unbridled usage of equally unbridled tunes: “Music was the only voice of cinema for a very long time before we had sound; it’s organically linked to cinema itself. So I see no reason to restrain myself, thinking how much music to put in the film.” Yet his musical methodology — or lack thereof — never fully worked until now. None of Dolan’s previous films have relied on the rapture of ’90s sentimentalism more than, or as conceptually aptly as, his newest film, Mommy, which sees US release on January 23.
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Let’s be honest: the Tim Burton of the 2000s and beyond is a much different director than the goth weirdo we all fell in love with from the days of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood. Artists have to eat, but the Tim Burton of the last ten years has been mostly using his visual acuity to bring big-budget hackwork to the screen, with most of it starring Johnny Depp.
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More end-of-year lists! Never enough end-of-year lists! But seriously, end-of-year list-making season does provide an opportunity to revisit the best aspects of the year gone by, and one of our favorites to make here at Flavorwire is this one: the year’s best lyrics. It’s been a year in which, let’s be honest, a whole lot of terrible things have happened in the US and around the world — which, if nothing else, means there’s been plenty of subject matter to address directly, or to inspire more oblique takes on the world in which we live. Here are our 25 favorites.
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The decline of MTV and the advent of YouTube have meant that music videos these days are free to be more risqué and boundary-pushing than ever before. With this in mind, for the last few years we’ve made it something of a December tradition to round up the year’s most notable NSFW music videos — some good, some bad, some artistically interesting, some gratuitous and even exploitative. 2014 certainly hasn’t let us down. In fact, it gave us what must surely be the first music video hosted on PornHub. (For that, we can thank Xiu Xiu, because of course.) Click on through to check out what this year had to offer — but not at work.
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